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Do you know the difference between manner, cause, and mode of death? That's what Medicolegal Death Investigation is all about. View this student - made video and determine the hows, whats, and whys of all of the victims, even the shark…

The medicolegal death investigation network is responsible for conducting death investigations and certifying the cause and manner of unexplained and unnatural deaths; these include homicides, suicides, and accidents. Approximately 20% of the 2.4 million deaths in the US each year are investigated by medicolegal death investigators, accounting for approximately 450,000 medicolegal death investigations annually.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings ~ Socrates

Death is the termination of the biological functions that define a living organism. It refers to both a particular event and to the condition that results thereby. The true nature of the latter has for millennia been a central concern of the world's spiritual traditions and of philosophical enquiry. Within the scientific community, death is frequently associated with a belief in materialism and the complete ending of mind or consciousness. Yet despite the common notion that this is a scientific viewpoint, consciousness itself has yet to be fully understood in science and psychology, and any view about the existence or non-existence of consciousness after death therefore remains a speculative belief.

All living organisms die in due course from senescence. Intervening phenomena which commonly bring about death earlier include malnutrition, disease, or accidents resulting in terminal physical injury. In the animal kingdom, predation is a cause of death for many species. Intentional human activity causing death includes suicide, homicide, and war. Death in the natural world can also occur as an indirect result of human activity: an increasing cause of species depletion in recent times has been destruction of ecosystems as a consequence of the widening spread of industrial technology.

Death in this context is now seen as less an event than a process: conditions once considered indicative of death are now reversible.

Where in the process a dividing line is drawn between life and death depends on factors beyond the presence or absence of vital signs. In general, clinical death is neither necessary nor sufficient for a determination of legal death. A patient with working heart and lungs determined to be brain dead can be pronounced legally dead without clinical death occurring. Precise medical definition of death, in other words, becomes more problematic, paradoxically, as scientific knowledge and technology advance.

Signs of death:

* Ceasing respiration - The body no longer metabolises
* Pallor mortis - Paleness which happens almost instantaneously (in the 15–120 minutes after the death)
* Livor mortis - A settling of the blood in the lower (dependent) portion of the body
* Algor mortis - The steady decline in body temperature, following death, until ambient temperature is matched
* Rigor mortis - The limbs of the corpse become stiff (Latin rigor) and difficult to move or manipulate
* Decomposition - The reduction into simpler forms of matter

An autopsy, also known as a postmortem examination or an obduction, is a medical procedure that consists of a thorough examination of a human corpse to determine the cause and manner of a person's death and to evaluate any disease or injury that may be present. It is usually performed by a specialized medical doctor called a pathologist.

Autopsies are either performed for legal or medical purposes. A forensic autopsy is carried out when the cause of death may be a criminal matter, while a clinical or academic autopsy is performed to find the medical cause of death and is used in cases of unknown or uncertain death, or for research purposes. Autopsies can be further classified into cases where external examination suffices, and those where the body is dissected and an internal examination is conducted.

Permission from next of kin may be required for internal autopsy in some cases. Once an internal autopsy is complete the body is generally reconstituted by sewing it back together. Autopsy is important in a medical environment and may shed light on mistakes and help improve practices.

A "necropsy" is an older term for a postmortem examination, unregulated, and not always a medical procedure. In modern times the term is more often used in the postmortem examination of the corpses of animals